Germaine Greer has sparked anger after she said that rapists should be given an ‘R’ tattoo on their cheek instead of being jailed in a speech at the Hay Literary Festival.

Greer, who was raped at a party days before she turned 19, said that most rape was actually just ‘bad sex’ and ‘don’t involve any injury whatsoever’.
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She told an audience: ‘We are told it’s one of the most violent crimes in the world – bullshit’.

She added: ‘Most rape is just lazy, just careless, just insensitive.

‘Every time a man rolls over on his exhausted wife and insists on enjoying his conjugal right, he is raping her. It will never end up in a court of law.

‘Instead of thinking of rape as a spectacularly violent crime – and some rapes are – think about it as non-consensual, that is, bad sex.

This is so retro it is funny.

Of course most of today's MeToo complaints about about what most people have called consensual sex.

It seems unjust for the law to provide impunity for their abusers. This may explain why several states have recently abolished statutes of limitations in rape cases (as California did in 2016), a trend that was galvanized by the pileup of accusations against Bill Cosby. Still, about half the states impose a statute of limitations in cases of rape.

It seems to me that rape needs a statute of limitations more than any other crime, because the evidence is gone in a matter of hours. Unless it is reported and investigated within a day, it is often impossible to tell who is telling the truth.

And in Greer's words, it might be just someone complaining about bad sex.